AMD is reportedly slated to add an L3 cache to its second generation quad-core Opterons, dubbed Zamora, to be launched in 2008. The addition of the shared L3 cache is an interesting move for an architecture that seemingly has suffered no performance bottleneck at the memory interface.

AMD Geeks may see this as a point of performance enhancement for its next generation architecture, while critical thinking Geeks may recognize a bandwidth squeeze starting to show in the darling HT architecture. Regardless of which Geek you are, quad-core processors may be the beginning on typical server and even workstation platforms hosting 8 or 16 cores. Architecturally, the traffic generated by these systems would seem challenging for every interconnect architecture without some major cache hierarchies. To assist with the performance, AMD plans to move these components to an FB-DIMM memory implementation, along with the beefed-up HT 3.0 spec.

Server Geeks should likely see some serious competition in this cash-cow sector of the market, but I'm sure the regular-Joe Geeks will enjoy the fight too.

1st Post(10:32am EST Mon May 08 2006)It sounds exciting, but I don't think L3 cache will make much of a performance increase. It probably wouldn't be worth the money to add it on. - by Bye bye

Question?(10:52am EST Mon May 08 2006)Im not all knowing of the CPU industry,

but our Uni wanted Opteron's but opted for Dellsbecause they just couldnt get them in time,

Is there a supply issue with AMD? or could there beanother reason, such as price … - by seek

Power consumption(11:23am EST Mon May 08 2006)Getting signals off chip at high speeds is quite power-consuming. Maybe the reduced need for high-speed off chip signaling could more than offset the increase in power consumption by the added cache?

Thought that intel was doing the same thing with it's low power mobile chips. - by Bee

Bye bye = Dum dum(11:44am EST Mon May 08 2006)The L3 cache will be yet another nail in the coffin of Intel's FSB bottleneck and their “new” Core Microarchitecture. Until Intel dumps the Core Microarchitecture (old Pentium 3 architecture) and redesigns for multicores from scratch, they will continue to have limited performance benefits by moving beyond 2 cores. Already, Intel has to use large amounts of costly cache to make their new dual core products compete with AMD products that have smaller die sizes far less cache more efficient designs and superior performance scalability. But this is only a stop gap measure, because Intel Quad core chips show minimal performance increase over dual cores because the antiquated Intel FSB is already maxed out at 1-2 cores. - by Bye bye = Dum dum

ZRAM L3 cache?(12:22pm EST Mon May 08 2006)Could this be the rumoured ZRAM L3 cache that's been bandied about for months now? With 5x the density of a typical SRAM cache, one should be able to fit a 10MB ZRAM cache into the same space that 2MB of SRAM cache would need. - by bbbl67

question(12:34pm EST Mon May 08 2006)I'm not a know it all about computers here so i won't pretend to be smart.I just have a question about them…What's going to happen when processors become so fast that they have to wait for the hard drive to access data?Won't that be considered a bottleneck???.

Will we have to go to some sort of hardware hard drive ? something non mechanical? or at least something as fast as the processors? - by JustAsking

Sure thing(12:44pm EST Mon May 08 2006)SRam Hard drives, you can get them, unfortunately they cost as much as a luxury car for a few gigs of storage. The storage is fast though, really fast. - by Darkstar

Re: JustAsking(1:10pm EST Mon May 08 2006)The hard drive is often a bottleneck, even today. As usual, it comes down to the type of app you're running and the rest of your hardware. As a (simplistic) example, if you have a program that, when running, runs entirely in your physical RAM, then hard drive access speeds would only affect load and possibly saving/closing times. So, today, the solution is to buy lots of memory! Using mirrored RAID will help, too, since it gives higher I/O than a single drive. Once only seen in servers and high-end workstations, it's slowly becoming more common in mainstream computers.

This situation used to be worse back in the DOS days. Back then, it was common to use RAMDRIVE to avoid the HDD bottleneck on certain read/write intensive apps. - by JRink

???(1:29pm EST Mon May 08 2006)This is getting quite mad, with more and more cores and more and more cache the chips are going to be getting so big that profits will fall and cost will rocket. There is no way we can sustain this. Is there no other way of making more powerful chips any more? have we really reached the limit and the only way we can get more power is to get bigger? I hope not - by Hougham

JustAsking(1:47pm EST Mon May 08 2006)Most programs run entirely in memory. Video games for example. Photoshop is a good example of a program that will often need to write to a hard-disk, which is why photoshop benefits from the installation of a dedicated scratch disk that it can use as extra memory. - by master of the univer

Re: JRink(2:18pm EST Mon May 08 2006)Don't you mean a striped RAID? Mirrored RAID will give you no performance boost speedwise, just the peace of mind that your data is stored redundantly.

- by PitViper

Too Late(2:24pm EST Mon May 08 2006)Intel and ICM will decimate AMD completely for the forseeable future. - by squirrelzipper

Yes, it would be nice to get rid of the hard drive once and for all. Maybe when one of the technologies often mentioned in Geek.com (like MRAM) actually works we'll be there. The hard drive people are always coming up with tricks to make it denser and cheaper, blowing away FLASH solutions.

Lots of hard drives come with their own cache. Maybe we should have larger caches on the hard drives. - by ideas

Sharikou(8:16pm EST Mon May 08 2006)The fourth comment in this email was written by Sharikou. His rants are amazingly redundant. - by Ignore Sharikou

I've heard AMD can't supply quick enough(8:39pm EST Mon May 08 2006)because they are so popular now - by YuriHA from México

AMD can't supply(9:55pm EST Mon May 08 2006)Because their technology sucks, they are late to 300mm, they are late to 65nm. They are using IBM's inferior process that has shown all its warts on the xbox and cell.- by Guess who

Hougham(10:12pm EST Mon May 08 2006)I'm not goatguy and I don't know everything there is to know about CPU's..

but isn't the fact that we're going to 65nm chips in itself shrinking ? thus allowing you to put more cache and other goodies on the chip because everything is shrinking? - by X-plattform

fact(11:02pm EST Mon May 08 2006)It takes more transistors to do more work, therefore, unless the process continues to shrink at a comparable rate, chips will eventually get bigger, or will have to change utterly. - by fact master flash

Some facts(11:33pm EST Mon May 08 2006)A rule of thumb is that density has been scaling at roughly 0.7 per generation.

Generally that means a chip should end up ~0.50 as big when you shrink from 90nm to 65nm.

The problem is them designers have run out of really good ideas and bloat the chips with more cache.. and more cores. In the end chips end up about the same size with 4 x the transistors that leak more and burn more power.

It be nice if the designers and architects would do some real invention and get something. If they could have done 1/2 of what the chip guys did we'd really have a chip. - by a real master chiper

2008???(1:05am EST Tue May 09 2006)AMD should have been dead by then. - by Woodcrest

Another thought…(6:19am EST Tue May 09 2006)Larger cores, more power consumption … not very green is it? - by YogurtWeaver

Hypocrites..(11:38am EST Tue May 09 2006)Any American who has a house in the burbs, drives anything but an econ car, doesn't carpool, uses and AC, has a house > 2000 sq foot should not be talking about power conservation - by Not a hypocrite

Not again(1:47pm EST Tue May 09 2006)Typical idiotic RickGeek comments. Why is it Ronnie Lindsay can write so well and yet RickGeek sounds more like a 8 year old kid all the time? - by Stop it pleas

re: Stop it pleas(2:56pm EST Tue May 09 2006)This isn't even my post cockmaster! Christ can't you whiny children keep your complaints in my posts? Stay out of Ronnie's You got a problem settle it in my post you prepubsent little girl, did your daddy touch you douche bag? - by RickGeek

Bla…(3:21pm EST Tue May 09 2006)65nm(SOI)(e-SiGe)(SMT) on 300mm wafers is K10 Rev G. K8L is as soon as AM2 comes out. K8L's are Rev F not the new arc. The new arc comes with the 65nm change in Q1 of 2007.

They are making 65nm K10's in Fab30 so they can get ready to release them by the end of the year. The release dates where pushed back since they don't need Fab36 to start production of K10's but can get started now. And later on spread to Fab36. Most of the volume of K8L's are aready made just to get the socket started.

Things with socket AM2 will really heat up when they do the major arc change.

AMD is far out of the ball game until we know how K10 does with Zram L2. Nobody can say how bad or good it is. Because we have nothing on the changes they did. Ppl K8L and K10 are 2 totally diff things like conroe is to netburst.

And socket F is even madder. I'm more intrested to see what comes of them. L3 Zram looks quite fast with 4mb's the stuff. AMD has not been sitting on their hands. They aready desined the bloody new arks 2 years ago and just are now able to get them into mass production. They didn't just wake up yesterday and say lets make this new stuff now. AMD has been planning this ever since they finished their K8's 3 years ago.

Hello does anybody know how cpu's are desined here but me? >.> *Rolls eyes* Its not all that surprising. Mostly cus AMD is too tight lipped about things more then intel is so go figure. I wanted to say that on another artical but it was dead. There now I said it on something releated to it. - by Fox

AMD is tight lipped(8:29pm EST Tue May 09 2006)That is funny I thought they were a whore and spread its lips for all - by Hound

FB Dimms are cheaper and come is very high densities (good) but have higher latency (bad)

Could be the extra L3 is just to counter the FB Dimm latency issue.

Somestimes a cigar.. is just a cigar as Dr. Sigmund might say..

- by Fire Sale!

Why not a bigger L2?(2:41am EST Wed May 10 2006)Instead of a hierarchy of caches, where some of the data could possibly get duplicated, how about larger caches instead of larger hierarchies? - by VoteAgainstHierarchy

kind of funny(4:30am EST Wed May 10 2006)“65nm(SOI)(e-SiGe)(SMT) on 300mm wafers is K10 Rev G. K8L is as soon as AM2 comes out. K8L's are Rev F not the new arc. The new arc comes with the 65nm change in Q1 of 2007.

They are making 65nm K10's in Fab30 so they can get ready to release them by the end of the year. The release dates where pushed back since they don't need Fab36 to start production of K10's but can get started now. And later on spread to Fab36. Most of the volume of K8L's are aready made just to get the socket started.

Things with socket AM2 will really heat up when they do the major arc change.

AMD is far out of the ball game until we know how K10 does with Zram L2. Nobody can say how bad or good it is. Because we have nothing on the changes they did. Ppl K8L and K10 are 2 totally diff things like conroe is to netburst.

And socket F is even madder. I'm more intrested to see what comes of them. L3 Zram looks quite fast with 4mb's the stuff. AMD has not been sitting on their hands. They aready desined the bloody new arks 2 years ago and just are now able to get them into mass production. They didn't just wake up yesterday and say lets make this new stuff now. AMD has been planning this ever since they finished their K8's 3 years ago.

Hello does anybody know how cpu's are desined here but me? >.> *Rolls eyes* Its not all that surprising. Mostly cus AMD is too tight lipped about things more then intel is so go figure. I wanted to say that on another artical but it was dead. There now I said it on something releated to it.” – by Fox

You make it sound like amd is choosing not to release these products/shrink because they choose not to. NO……. It's because they are not ready. If a an underdog company has a new product that will perform better than the competition they will more than likely release it, now if amd vs intel was a 50/50 market share then yeah they could afford to play the wait and see game…..but last time I checked amd vs intel was like a 20/80 market share….if amd had been working on this new tech 3 years ago then they would of already released it if they had it, come on who the fuck are you kidding. Truth is that amd had a homerun with the amd64 arc and that's it…..they got a good chip with a catchy slogan 64bit….oh by the way……..when are we going to take advantage of that 64bit chip???? Don't say xp64…..that OS is a joke. - by truth

who the hell bought them for 64bit?(5:46pm EST Tue May 23 2006)I don't know about you but I didn't buy them for a non existent 64bit WINDOWS OS. I bought them because they were much better. An honestly….. would MS had designed a 64bit OS (Vista) if Intel or AMD had no 64Bit CPU's? Hmmm…. do I need to answer that? Don't be a clown. - by Clown